The North, Europe and the end of traditional Danish geopolitics

Description

Gudmund Hatt (1884-1960), the professor of human geography at Copenhagen University from 1929 to 1947, considered himself to be the only Danish political geographer of his time. From the late 1930s, he was an extraordinarily prolific author of geopolitical analyses, particularly for popular consumption. Fatefully, however, Hatt continued these activities well into the German occupation of Denmark and was for his ‘pro-German’ stance dismissed in the post-war purges. In important respects, this history explains the virtual absence of political geography in Danish geography until the 1990s. As a contribution to a critical historiography of Nordic geopolitics, I will outline Hatt’s argument on the Nordic countries in the European conflict and discuss how also for him, geographical thought bore the imprint of the author’s historical-geographical position.

Period	10 Jun 2009
Event title	Nordic Geographers Meeting
Event type	Conference
Location	Turku, FinlandShow on map